Am Beispiel meines Bruders

Uwe Timm was 2 years old when his brother died on the Eastern front, as part of the Waffen-SS. All he has of his brother is a tiny memory fragment of someone blond, a frustratingly vague diary his brother kept, and the word of his parents that his brother was a good kid. An idealist who didn't hate anyone, who couldn't be a coward and refuse to do his part, who definitely wouldn't have been part of... y'know, that. Who just wanted to serve his country like his father had before him. And sure, his father was a difficult person to live with, but his mother was a truly kind person who could never have raised someone who would do... well, that.

So how come that diary doesn't mention any details? How could a good kid - and by extension, a country full of good people - witness all that, even if they weren't actively part of it, and choose not to see it, and later to see it as something that happened to them? Where does that come from? Isn't that the most cowardly thing of all?

We lost both our home and our boy, was one of the sentences they used to not have to think about the reasons. They thought that with this suffering, they'd done their part in atoning for what happened. Everything was dreadful, partly because they were supposedly victims, victims of an incomprehensible collective destiny.

Timm had to wait until the rest of his family had died to write this; not because he couldn't ask them, but because he'd already heard their answers a hundred times and they didn't tell him anything new. His father who became a bitter drunk mumbling about how they could have won the war honourably if not for Hitler, his mother who kept wondering what really happened to her son, his sister who only remembered him as a... kid. He digs into it, tries to find out what he can about his brother, tries to figure out what Gitta Sereny called the German Trauma. Other writers have written more about that, but he sticks to the personal angle. There are no easy answers there, and in the end the book sort of peters out - as it probably should. But the way there is a fascinating, painful read.